Today’s round up is competition focused with women in the spotlight. There’s a call for Asian women photographers, as well as recently announced winners in some European-based competitions, including home-grown talent Vanessa Winship.

At some point I want to look at competitions in more detail, particularly in relation to the ever increasing number of them, the question of entry fees (for example, how transparent are photo competitions regarding what happens to entry fees?), criteria for entry, as well as questions relating to how age and gender impact on the world of competitions.

ASIAN WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS – CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Asian women photographers are invited to submit work for inclusion in an evening showcase curated by reminders project and pdfX12’s Yumi Goto as part of the Angkor Photo Festival held in Siem Reap, Cambodia from November 20 to 27.

SUBMIT
Email g.youme@gmail.com with the following:

Completed bodies of work and ongoing projects are both acceptable. The photo essay may be about any issue or event, but must have been photographed in the applicant’s native country.

“Her work develops ideas as the concepts of border, place, desire, identity, history, memory and how the stories and the identities are reported and expressed. Her imaginary one also explores the juxtaposition between the chronicle and the fiction…

“In this series of portraits Winship hoped the symbol of the uniform, the distance in repetition, and the austerity of the landscape would represent one thing. She also seeked the expressions of the girls faces to draw attention to the idea of these young girls poised at the moment “just before”. The moment where possibility lies, a time where the presentation of self, teeters into consciousness.” From the press release.

Winship has won World Press Photo awards and was nominated as photographer of the year by the Sony World Photography Iris D’Or. She has published two monographs, Sweet Nothings (2008) and Schwarzes Meer (The Black Sea, 2007) and is represented by the Agency Vu.

The contest is aimed at professional photographers and received 1,851 registrations, 1,380 in the Madrid session and 471 in the sessions of São Paulo and Guatemala City.

INTERNATIONAL AWARD FOR CONCERNED PHOTOGRAPHY – F AND F25 Award
The International Award for Concerned Photography – now in its third year – has announced the winners of two awards.

The F Award, which received 287 entries from photographers from 43 different countries, has been won by Jérôme Sessini from France for his photo essay, So far from God, too close to America. Sessini receives “a contribution of euro 20.000, the possibility of publishing a book and of having an exhibition of the selected work”.

Matt Eich from the USA receives the F25 Award for photographers under 25 for his essay, Carry Me Ohio. Eich receives a one-year scholarship in Fabrica’s Photography Department. 19 entries were submitted for this prize.

The jury was chaired by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art of New York and included Monica Allende, Director of Photography, The Sunday Times Magazine; Enrico Bossan, Director of Photography, Fabrica; Melissa Harris, Editor-in-chief, Aperture magazine; Roberto Koch, President, Forma; Paolo Pellegrin, Photographer Magnum Photos; and Urs Stahel, Director of the Museum of Winterthur (Zurich).

The F award is a creation of Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, created by Contrasto, based in Milan and Fabrica, the Benetton Group’s Research Centre on Communication, based in Treviso.

“The Jury agreed unanimously that Jérôme Sessini’s ongoing exploration of drug-related violence in Mexico at the U.S. border is remarkable for its sustained engagement with an increasingly alarming and dangerous reality, for its attention to concrete particulars, and for its ambition to convey the scope and complexity of the conflict”.

“In an effort to give a voice to increasingly marginalized communities destroyed by nearly 150 years of unmitigated mining, Matt Eich documents the daily lives of the people in Southeastern Ohio. Once rich in coal, salt, clay and timber, this region has been stripped bare of all natural resources—its people left to fend for themselves with minimal opportunities, horrific housing conditions, and sub-standard schools.

“As occurs in so many impoverished areas, the fabric holding together these communities is slowly disintegrating, as the people become more and more demoralized, often turning to drugs. Matt’s ongoing exploration conveys their struggles—further exacerbated and contextualized by the current economic situation—while simultaneously pays homage to their strength and resilience in the face of such adversity”.

I am co-founder of Tri-pod, a creative initiative supporting lens-based artists with personal projects in process, and am a regular contributor to Photofusion Photography Centre's website, as well as contributing essays to Hotshoe, a quarterly contemporary photography magazine. Previously, I was the editorial content manager and project developer of Frame and Reference, an online visual arts magazine for the South East from 2013-14.
The Roaming Eye is curated by Miranda Gavin. All views are my own.

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